MONTH TWO IS ALMOST OVER! WHAT?!
*ahem*
God has brought my team and I to Nepal in a little village located in a valley surrounded by mountains and a sea of rice fields. Probably one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to and I get to stay and live here for a month. This month, almost every day (with a few exceptions of days we stay and clean the church or storage rooms) we hike. We take different routes each day and pass out tracks and evangelize along the way. Every day is something new, new people to see and talk to, new mountains to hike up and there are constantly new ways for God to show up and be God.
First day of ministry a woman came up to me while I was praying for another lady and after talking to her for a while (she spoke English pretty well) I asked her if there was anything I could pray for her about. She told me she could barely move her wrist because there was a lot of pain in it. I then told her I would pray to Jesus and I held her wrist and prayed for Him to show her how much He loved her. After I prayed, I asked her to move her wrist and she did and before I could even ask her if it was healed she whipped around and laid my hands on her shoulder with tears in her eyes. Two other teammates came and we all started to pray for her. I prayed that she knew that it wasn’t me that was doing this, but God. After that, she said she had no more pain anywhere in her body… our God loves to blow our minds!
Every day is something new. Every day is God pushing us to just let Him be Him. That anything we do while sweating and hiking is not from us. We were called to just go, so that’s what we do. When our legs are crying out in pain and for rest, before we know it, we are where we need to be because God never said when we go that it would be easy but that He would get us there if we were willing.
That doesn’t mean we are always accepted and neither is the message we carry. We have been rejected because of the message we carry. And it also doesn’t mean that miraculous physical healings happens every day. But that’s ok with me. If God calls me to climb a mountain to just tell a young woman that she is seen and not forgotten, than that is what I’ll rejoice in doing.
My life is not my own anymore…
“A hearer’s response is not our responsibility; our responsibility is to be faithful to God’s call and the message of the gospel. No, a hearer’s response is his or her responsibility. But one of the mistakes we can make in our focusing on individual response in the gospel on the ground is to lose sight of God’s sovereign working behind our words and actions and our hearer’s response.” – Matt Chandler in “Explicit Gospel”
